Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend

Rome, Informa, And Another Opportunity To Tick People Off

Some developers at Sun have produced Rome to parse all RSS variants as well as Atom. I’ve yet to evaluate it for use in HotSheet (which I intend to do) but I’d have to say that I’m still of the same opinion that I had before with regard to reinventing the wheel.
Make no mistake, I’m no huge fan of Informa because I think that most of its features are not well documented, lack examples, and don’t build on each other in a clear fashion. I really just want basic functionality and a cookbook that shows what the other features in the system are and how to add only the ones in which I’m interested. However, with that said, I still think it likely that three developers could have refactored the Informa code to get it into a more clearly delineated set of functionality and added the parsers they wanted to add (e.g. Atom) with less effort than starting over from scratch. But that’s just my opinion…

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2 thoughts on “Rome, Informa, And Another Opportunity To Tick People Off”

I dunno – Informa seems to be trying to do more than one thing, such as parse *and* persist, where Rome has more focus. I’d have preferred they joined RSSLibJ, because it seems to dovetail exactly what they wanted (and they didn’t look at it, despite it being pure Java and focused on RSS generation and parsing) but hey… they wanted to do it, too, I suppose.

don’t forget pearfear.org’s feedparser which is used in newsmonster. it’s actually a jarkata commons sandbox project. There are/were a few bugs in it but it supports most everything and works pretty well. I’m using a slightly tweaked version in Caterpillar http://caterpillar.masukomi.org
It should not, however, be confused with mark pilgrim’s feed parser which is far more forgiving of badly formatted feeds.